The flame and its heat play an essential role in a multitude of alchemical operations, such as distillation or calcinatio (drying). The police are also called “the heat.” A criminal who hasn’t been caught yet is always concerned about avoiding the heat. A criminal who has been detected wants to escape or outwit the heat.

Referring to the medieval idea of the “daemonic,” Jung writes that “demons are nothing other than intruders from the unconscious, spontaneous irruptions of the unconscious complexes into the continuity of the conscious process. Complexes are comparable to demons which fitfully harass our thought and actions; hence in antiquity and the Middle Ages

Whether the shadow becomes our friend or enemy depends largely upon ourselves. As the dreams of the unexplored house and the French desperado both show, the shadow is not necessarily always an opponent. In fact, he is exactly like any human being with whom one has to get along, sometimes by giving in, sometimes by resisting, sometimes by giving

In my estimation, Jung’s concept of the shadow and, in particular, May’s less familiar model of the daimonic, have paved the way toward a more progressive psychology of evil. Because the daimonic stands in contrast to Peck’s premise of the demonic, it is worthwhile to examine May’s model in more detail.

Jung believed that God, the living God, could be found only where we least want to look, the place we have the most resistance to exploring. This living God is entwined with our own darkness and shadow, woven in our wounds and complexes, laced with pathologies. On the other hand, the God of Belief, the God removed from creation and from everyday

A potential pitfall with the Jungian doctrine of the shadow is the temptation to project evil, not onto some external entity such as the devil, but rather onto “a relatively autonomous ‘splinter personality’”16 residing deep within us—namely, the compensatory “shadow,” “stranger,” or “other.” Thus, instead of saying “The devil made me do it,” one

In every multiple personality case, you can always clearly identify the shadow. It’s not always evil—it’s just different than the ego. Jung said the truth of the matter is that the shadow is ninety percent pure gold. Whatever has been repressed holds a tremendous amount of energy, with a great positive potential. So the shadow, no matter how

If we flee from the evil in ourselves, we do it at our hazard. All evil is potential vitality in need of transformation. To live without the creative potential of our own destructiveness is to be a cardboard angel.

This was Jung’s finding, too: the human psyche consists of light and dark, masculine and feminine, and countless other syzygies that coexist in a fluctuating state of psychic tension. Like the Taoists, Jung warned against resolving this tension by identifying with only one pole (for example, trying only to be productive in life). He felt that